Arief Wijaya is the Program Director of WRI Indonesia with responsibilities to provide strategic leadership and oversee programmatic portfolios in Indonesia, that include Agriculture, Forestry & Land-Use (AFOLU), and Climate, Energy, Cities & The Ocean (CECO) sectors. He leads the establishment of Climate and Ocean Programs in Indonesia, and contribute to the development of Indonesia's Forest Program.

He has technical expertise on tropical forest landscapes management, drivers of deforestation and forest degradation research, MRV REDD+, low carbon development and climate mitigation.

Prior to joining WRI, he worked at Thünen Institute of International Forestry and Forest Economics in Hamburg, Germany and focused on the analysis of drivers of deforestation/reforestation and spatial modeling of tropical landscape dynamics in the Philippines and Ecuador. Previously, he spent 4 years working at Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) based in Indonesia, and is responsible to integrate socio-economic and spatial data for analyzing drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in Indonesia, Vietnam, Peru, Brazil, Cameroon and Zambia. He was also an observer of UN Climate negotiations, following the progress of REDD+ and climate change mitigation negotiations.

He holds a PhD in Geoinformatics from Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany and MSc in Natural Resources Management from International Institute of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) The Netherlands.

Apart from the work, he loves cooking and enjoys Asian culinary, listening music and watching movies.